Aperio

An accessible, keyboard-first calendar, task, and contact application for the desktop — built screen-reader-first, local-first, and provider-agnostic.

Status: in active development, pre-release. The core feature set is implemented and in daily use, but there are no binary releases yet — you currently build from source. The remaining gaps are tracked openly in TODO.md; the full specification lives in DESIGN.md (German).

What it does

• Calendars, tasks, and contacts as equals — multiple sources side by side, each with its own color and visibility toggle.
• Providers: Google, iCloud and any CalDAV/CardDAV server, Outlook / Microsoft 365 (Graph), Exchange (EWS), read-only iCal feeds (e.g. public holidays), Vikunja, and Todoist — plus purely local calendars and lists that need no account at all.
• Views: day, week, month, year, agenda, and a dedicated task view — including a backlog column in the week/month planners for drag-and-drop day planning (tasks and events).
• The usual suspects, done accessibly: recurring events with occurrence/series handling, reminders with per-item notification sounds, free/busy lookups, RSVP, color labels, full-text search, system-tray background mode.
• Cross-device sync over your storage — WebDAV, Dropbox, Google Drive, SFTP, FTP, or a shared folder. There is no Aperio server; an append-only event log with snapshots keeps devices in step. Optional end-to-end encryption (AES-256-GCM, Argon2id key derivation) covers the whole dataset — with E2E enabled, even account credentials sync encrypted so accounts work on every device without re-entry.
• Plugin architecture: every provider adapter is a plugin behind a stable C ABI, so additional backends can be written in any language and installed as .aperio packages at runtime.
• Languages: English and German UI and documentation.

Accessibility

Accessibility is the project's founding constraint, not an afterthought:

• Developed and manually tested screen-reader-first (primarily NVDA); dialogs keep focus mode stable, views expose proper grid/list/tree semantics, and every state change is announced via live regions.
• Keyboard-first: every action is reachable without a mouse (Outlook-style two-level navigation, F6 region cycling, documented shortcuts). Drag-and-drop is always a redundant mouse affordance on top of an existing keyboard path.

Documentation

The documentation is one Astro Starlight site (landing page, legal pages and all docs), published via GitHub Pages: https://timtam.github.io/aperio/ The source lives in web/.

Section	Audience
User Guide (English)	Using Aperio
Benutzerhandbuch (Deutsch)	Aperio benutzen
Developer Guide	Architecture, contributing
Plugin Development	Writing adapters against the C ABI

In-repo: DESIGN.md is the complete (German) specification the implementation is audited against; TODO.md is the code-verified list of what is still open.

Connecting Google (for now): Aperio does not ship a verified Google app registration yet, so connecting a Google account currently requires your own free Google Cloud OAuth client. The user guide contains a step-by-step walkthrough. An official, published registration is planned — afterwards this step disappears.

Building from source

Tool	Version
Rust	≥ 1.80
Node.js	≥ 20
Tauri CLI	2.x (npm install installs it as a dev dependency)

Platform-specific prerequisites: see the Tauri docs.

Linux

For Tauri builds:

sudo apt-get install \
  libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev \
  libayatana-appindicator3-dev \
  librsvg2-dev \
  libssl-dev \
  libgtk-3-dev \
  libsoup-3.0-dev \
  libjavascriptcoregtk-4.1-dev

Windows

WebView2 ships with Windows 10 21H2+ and Windows 11. On older systems the app downloads a bootstrap installer on first start.

Development

# Install frontend dependencies
npm install

# Dev mode (backend + frontend with hot reload)
npm run tauri dev

# Tests
cargo test --workspace
npm test

# Lint
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
npm run lint

Aperio runs portable by default: if a writable data/ directory exists (or can be created) next to the binary, all data lives there; otherwise it falls back to the platform's user-profile directory.

Project layout

aperio/
├── Cargo.toml              # Workspace root
├── DESIGN.md               # Full specification (German)
├── TODO.md                 # Open implementation gaps (code-verified)
├── crates/
│   ├── cal-core/           # Shared calendar/task/contact types and traits
│   ├── sync-core/          # Cross-device sync: event log, snapshots, E2E crypto
│   ├── vc-core/            # Video-conferencing trait surface
│   ├── plugin-core/        # Plugin C ABI + manager
│   ├── plugin-sdk/         # Rust SDK for plugin authors
│   └── adapter-*/          # One crate per provider, whatever it serves —
│                           #   calendars, tasks, contacts, storage, meetings
│                           #   (+ the -plugin and -cdylib crates around it)
├── web/                    # Astro Starlight site: landing + docs (user de/en, dev, plugin)
├── src-tauri/              # Tauri backend (commands, sync engine, reminders)
└── src/                    # React/TypeScript frontend

On the use of AI

Aperio is developed in close collaboration with an AI coding assistant (Anthropic's Claude, driven through Claude Code): a large share of the code, tests, and documentation is AI-written under continuous human direction. Design decisions, feature priorities, and acceptance are made by a human; changes are verified by the full test/lint suite, security- and correctness-critical work additionally goes through adversarial AI review passes, and accessibility behaviour is tested manually with a screen reader. If you find that something slipped through regardless — issues and bug reports are very welcome.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0.